Overview of spam from Compuserve

15 Feb 2006

Note: Automated spam monitoring stopped several years
ago. These web pages are maintained for historical reasons. Some
may be updated from time to time as news about the individual sites
becomes available.

Overview of history

General information about Compuserve

Compuserve is one of the oldest and best-known ISP's on the net.
Although there are occasional problems with netnews spam from Compuserve,
they are few and far between. Email spam is another matter. In
addition, in Aug, 1998, large numbers of rogue cancels began
coming from Compuserve.

Compuserve also owns Interserve, presumably to service
higher-end customers. Both have been the source of spam on occasion.

Compuserve, like many major service providers, exerts the
absolute minimum effort required to stay off the
Realtime Black List and avoid the
Usenet Death Penalty. Compuserve
allowed spam problems to get worse and worse until an actual
UDP was instituted against them. They then implemented whatever
measures are required to reverse the UDP.

Compuserve admins have requested that I track Sprynet seperately.
Sprynet is now owned by Mindspring.

18 Nov 1997: Compuserve was UDP'd.
News articles on the UDP can be found at
C|Net
and
InfoWorld. UDP lasted only one day. Compuserve has agreed to adopt
and enforce an anti-abuse acceptable use policy.

14 Nov 1997: Discussion has begun on issuing a
UDP against Compuserve.

General notes:

Only a small subset of usenet (261 groups) was sampled. Only
articles that hadn't been cancelled yet were counted. Actual
spam may have been much greater.

Heuristics that detect single-posted articles are, by their very
nature, somewhat shaky. Innocent articles may be tagged as spam
because they share certain characteristics or keywords with
actual spam. In particular, a posted spam complaint that includes
the spam in its entirety will very often be identified as spam.

Some posts may be forgeries intended to look like they came
from Compuserve.

The first entry in the history file is not used to compute peak
or average spam counts, as this entry covers an unknown number of days.
This may cause an apparent disreprency between spam totals and spam
averages.

The opinions expressed on this page are solely those of Ed Falk and do
not necessarily represent those of any other organization, (although I
hope they do). I wish to thank Rahul.net for hosting this web page.